Albania Blasts Soviets for Allowing Moscow Jews to Mark Simchas Torah

December 5, 1969

LONDON (Dec. 4)

Albania, the pro-Peking Communist state in the Balkans, has sharply criticized Soviet authorities for permitting Moscow Jews to celebrate Simchat Torah in the street outside of the main synagogue there last October. According to the Albanian news agency “Bashkimi” the celebration was an example of “leniency toward the clergy” by the Soviet “revisionists.”

The news agency said that 12,000 young Jews danced and sang “Hava Nagilah” in a religious ceremony of a pronounced Zionist character and disrupted traffic whole Moscow police stood by. This was tantamount to encouragement, the Albanian source claimed, “because we know that Soviet police previously intervened under the pretext of traffic violations to disperse demonstrations by workers and progressive revolutionaries.”